Lee Tien, an attorney with the digital rights group Electronic Frontier Foundation -- which argues that the proposed bill doesn't go far enough to protect consumers' privacy -- tells MediaPost that the bill "tries to cover so much territory that many people are just not sure what it means."

"The Supreme Court has always upheld the principle that you have the right to speak anonymously — that the decision to identify yourself as a speaker is an aspect of speech itself," said Lee Tien, a senior staff attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Tien also noted that many people, especially younger ones, regularly swap phones and SIM cards and buy used cell phones, further blurring the identity of the phones' users and owners.

A bill of rights sends a message to sites about what their users expect. With enough momentum, it can give user-focused commercial open-source projects an opportunity to distinguish themselves by adopting the rights — and highlight the sites who aren’t willing to. It’s also a way of providing input in the ongoing debates about legislation and regulation. And just as importantly, the discussions around a bill of rights are a great opportunity for education and debate about what kind of online society we want to create.

There’s already been a lot of excellent work towards a Social Network Users Bill of Rights from Jack Lerner, Lisa Borodkin, Mark Sullivan, EFF, the Madrid Declaration, free-association.net, OpenSocialWeb, John Battelle, Duncan Work, and others.

That document will be drafted collaboratively over the four day period, building on points made by here at SFGate by Jack Lerner and Lisa Borodkin, as well as by the Electronic Frontier Foundation and PC World. The process will encompass transparent in-person debate, online input and a final vote on the proposed language, to be published by CFP organizers.

The nonprofit Electronic Frontier Foundation took up Augusto's case. The group's Fred Von Lohmann says the Copyright Act is very clear: "If you own a copy of a book or CD or any other copyrighted work that was lawfully made, you have the right to dispose of that as you see fit."

Then, in early 2010, Jeff Rosen at Wolfire Studios (another independent developer, behind the game Lugaru) put together a package of five titles -- World of Goo, Aquaria, Gish, Lugaru and Penumbra:Overture -- that would be put up for sale under the title of "The Humble Indie Bundle". Purchasers were invited to choose how much they wanted to pay, and all the proceeds were distributed between the developers and a pair of charities -- Child's Play and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, with the split being chosen by the purchaser. Within a week, the package raised $1 million from 116,000 purchasers, and $325,000 was donated to charity.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation, an organization dedicated entirely to "champion(ing) the public interest in every critical battle affecting digital rights" has taken on Augusto's case. And just when you thought buying used CDs from a local record store was the safe bet... think again.

A coalition of 10 advocacy organizations including the Center for Digital Democracy, Electronic Frontier Foundation and World Privacy Forum also weighed in. Those groups said they favored a system that would allow marketers to collect non-sensitive information by default, but would also require them to obtain explicit consent to keep the data for longer than 24 hours.